To build a planet you need lots of rubble and that means lots of heavy elements – stuff more massive than atoms of hydrogen and helium. The elemental composition of the collapsing nebula that gave birth ...

Researchers, including physicists from Heidelberg University, have gained new insights into dark energy and the theory of gravitation by analysing data from the "Planck" satellite mission of the European ...

They won the Nobel Prize for changing our understanding of the universe, but their discovery left an even larger mystery -- what is this dark energy that is propelling the universe to expand so fast? ...

Dark matter... It came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. Within its confines, galaxies formed and evolved. If you add up all the parts contained within any given galaxy you derive its mass, yet ...

Earlier this week, scientists announced that a telescope observing faint echoes of the so-called "Big Bang" had found evidence of the universe's nearly instantaneous expansion from a mere dot into a dense ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The simplest, most sensible "Big Bang" universe, theoretical physicists believe, would be one in which equal numbers of particles and antiparticles are formed in pairs. As the universe cools, ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The AMS particle detector will take off on 29 April 2011 at 21.47 CEST onboard the very last mission of the space Shuttle Endeavour. AMS, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, will then be installed ...

A new era in astronomy will come a step closer when scientists from across Europe present their design study today for an advanced observatory capable of making precision measurements of gravitational waves ...

(Phys.org) —A pair of researchers, Tal Alexander of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel and Priyamvada Natarajan with Yale University in the U.S. has come up with a possible explanation for the ...

The recent BICEP2 observations – of swirls in the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background – have been proclaimed as many things, from evidence of the Big Bang and gravitational waves to something ...

(Phys.org) —If recent news that University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) researchers observed the largest gamma ray burst ever has you nervous about getting blasted into extinction by a massive burst from ...

It has long puzzled scientists that there were enormously massive galaxies that were already old and no longer forming new stars in the very early universe, approx. 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Now ...